In 2023, let’s rediscover wrongness
jessesingal.substack.com
jessesingal.substack.com
An excellent example is "Ancient Aliens"*. The show is wrong, to be sure, but very careful to make wrong implications with non-wrong claims. IMO it ought to be required viewing in all elementary schools.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...
> Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
* for those who have not seen it, each episode is a work of art, starting out with the uncontroversial, and ending with some wild hypothesis, with the "documentary format" hosts couching everything in impeccable language. A typical statement: "Ancient astronaut theorists believe X. What if it were true?"
> ... 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.'
In text (thus without inflection), one can interpret this several ways.
> I never told anybody ...
It wasn't Harry who spilled the beans.
> I never told anybody ...
But Harry had photographs to show them.
> I never told anybody ...
Someone has blamed Harry (for making it up? for sharing truth prematurely?) and he's trying to defend himself.
Presumably, however, Al's wife never was a stripper. But this second-hand account of a statement that A) may not have existed or B) was meant to indicate it was never true, brings to the mind of the viewer/listener a different version of this woman's past and could very well indict her with a questionable history.
It's obvious slippery slope arguments that lead to censorship and nanny states if not worse.
The correct answer is not to believe that everyone is a Netflix show away from being a conspiracy theorist, but to instead present the evidence against and counter arguments.
To add to that, if people do not trust the experts, it is not because wonky shows have created distrust, it is because the experts and authorities are not behaving honestly. People aren't as stupid as the Guardian author and authorities seem to think or want them to be. People enough lies and spin they start to wonder "what else are they lying about if this is the not-even-trying-to-hide-it stuff."
Hold authorities and experts to account, rather than patronise the population and then try to censor their displeasure.
My instinct is to agree with you, but I can’t actually think of any examples where this tends to be the case. Which experts/authorities need to be held to account?
So all of them at all times.
As of more recently, I think Dr. Fauci should be held accountable for lying to the American public in the last two years, from the effectiveness of masks to the effectiveness of the CV vaccines to the effectiveness of mandates to crowning himself as the herald of science (e.g., paraphrasing "if you disagree with me, you disagree with science").
This I feel is what is problematic. Social media making this kind of statement is usual, but something like Guardian making statements like this continues to reduce the amount of trust we have in supposedly high quality media like Guardian.
Personally, I am interested in more media that I can trust to say/report the right thing. And I am still searching.
Another way of thinking about it is the show Ancient Aliens has been on air for over a decade. Did you know it is still running after its 15 minutes of fame and memes? Many articles talked about it being "fringe", but rarely did we call it conspiracy.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fab...
Shows like Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse are a funnel into a world of conspiracy theories that all end up with anti-semitic conspiracy theories about "Jewish globalist elites" who want to do "white genocide".
It seems to contradict historical observations. We've had societies based on strong sense of doctrinal orthodoxy before, and this was very limiting. Introducing a sort of right to be wrong has been instrumental to improving society and science.
Consider flat earth conspiracy theories (which are not nearly as harmful as white supremacist ones and I don't mean to equate them, only to pivot to a different example that's a less touchy subject); it's trivial to debunk FE arguments, and people have, exhaustively. But unlike phlogiston, that didn't make the FE stop having currency in our discourse. It's not just something wrong which will lose out in the marketplace of ideas. In the documentary "Behind the Curve," several of the flat earthers come up with really compelling experiments that debunk the flat earth. But they aren't actually convinced by their own results. A conspiracy theory or system of conspiracy theories survives by being an endless font of explanations that paper over the inconsistencies. Those that are unable to do this either die off or are incorporated into a larger system of theories that have more explanatory power.
As a matter of free speech it shouldn't be illegal to hold or to discuss these views, but unlike ideas that are simply wrong they create and enhance hazards as they spread. They isolate people within these communities; I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone who is a hardcore conspiracy theorist, but it can be really difficult to connect and interact with them because they will have really strong responses to seemingly innocuous things, and constantly insist that you're a rube for not thinking along the same lines. This often erodes their relationships with people outside the culture of the conspiracy theory (which are often very loving & supportive places). These communities form a millieu which hate groups and fascist movements can be drawn from, not because these individual people are especially hateful, but because they've been indoctrinated into a cult-like setting where a proposition like, "there are children being held in the basement of this particular pizza parlor, someone needs to step up and save them" is taken quite seriously. You don't have to be a hateful person to show up to a pizza parlor with a gun (or commit other acts of violence) once you've developed the sincere belief that children's lives are at stake and that it's your personal responsibility to defend them.
How to properly counter this phenomenon is largely an unsolved problem, and I'm not suggesting that a dictatorial approach is warranted (that'd pretty obviously backfire by seemingly validating the conspiracy), but there's more nuance here than orthodoxy vs. free exchange of ideas. We need to find a way to continue the free exchange of ideas while addressing these dangerous, emergent phenomenon.
I'm currently working on software to help people create a personal epistemology, to compare theirs with others, and to collaborate on a shared epistemology. There's various reasons I think this is a good idea, but one of them is that I think being able to demonstrate what you believe and why would be beneficial to our discourse and hopefully counteract conspiracism.
In fact, these conspiracies spring up backwards, from the desired outcome:
* white supremacists need a scapegoat to justify their own power aims. They choose Jews.
* to convince others, they invent wild conspiracy theories about Jews having a secret Zionist global power structure, controlling banks, markets, governments, media, etc.
* they realize they can bind this group to even benign but wild and fanciful fantasies for 12 year olds like "the earth is flat" and "aliens exist"
So it doesn't matter what the actual "big if true" fantasy is - just that the rest of the world has already accepted it's not true, so if it is true, someone is hiding it from you, and what else are they hiding?
The same "open" mind that comes to "accept" the earth is flat - or even just lowers their "dogmatic" trait as a result - becomes more "open" to the idea someone is controlling the narrative.
It's extremely unscientific, because it is not based in objectivity, but purely power dynamics of the narrative.
2 + 2 can be made to equal 5.
Neither the conspiracy theorists nor the scientific dogmatists are scientific.
Science is based on doubt. It's based on not accepting anything as true until you are convinced. To call questioning what you are being told unscientific is just bizarre. It's the most scientific thing you can do. The basic posture of science is skepticism, not conviction. You don't know until you're convinced.
If anything, the conspiracy crackpots are gaining a foothold because science is reduced to mere dogma. They may be wrong, but it's a mistake to think they are idiots.
Both the scientific dogmatists and the conspiracy theorists essentially make the same mistake. They're skeptics with regards to other peoples' convictions but refuse to consider challenges to their own beliefs.
A big reason why for example the covid conspiracies got such traction was that the official narrative was inconsistent and self-contradictory. It was presented as much more certain than it could have been. Good science takes a long time to produce. Preliminary results may take several quarters, good confidence comes after a couple of years. What we had in 2020 was mostly educated guesswork.
The most scientific thing would have been to stand in front of the press and say "honestly, dunno, come back in six months or so and we may have some workable data for you". But that's not what happened. Instead, their confidence was overstated (by governments, media), and official messages kept changing.
Countries all over the world were all confidently sticking to their strategy, claiming it to be scientific, yet at the same time they were opting for contradictory strategies with regard to high-visibility interventions like mask mandates and lockdowns.
It's also somewhat questionable how scientific this could have been, given scientific confidence typically comes after the data, and this was the first time such strategies has been implemented at a societal scale.
The most damning of all is that politically inconvenient hypotheses were confidently dismissed as fake news and crazy conspiracy ramblings without proper investigation, some of them later turned out to actually have credibility (such as the lab leak hypothesis[1][2][3] which was considered in the same tier as flat-earth at some point). Again, the scientific thing would be to say "I don't know if this is true, let's go and investigate".
All this looked bad specifically because a lot of things that weren't scientific at all were constantly paraded around under the banner of scientific certainty, which in turn fanned the flames of all manner of conspiracy theories because the doctrine was visibly self-contradictory and kept changing.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-hypo...
But COVID conspiracies are
* the "jab" sterilizes you, implants chips inside you, turns you gay, gives you cancer, etc.
* the whole disease is a hoax ("plandemic") to instill social control, remove freedoms, eliminate churches and Christianity, manipulate the economy ("LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"), give Joe Biden a way to steal the election, let socialism take over ... (guess who's doing all this, by the way!)
* the disease is real, but deliberately spread by China (at the behest of the reverse vampires and the Rand Corporation) to decimate the West and do the same things above
One set of these "hypotheses" are potentially worth investigating - and the US Senate, House, the CDC, both Presidencies, and world agencies galore did investigate those.
The others are not. Not all "crackpot theories" are equally cracked.
Jumping to the conclusion that because there is no evidence, that this in itself means something is true or false, that is committing exactly the same category of logical error the flat earthers and ancient aliens people are doing. In the absence of evidence is uncertainty.
After reading _The Righteous Mind_, this is something Jonathan Haidt's book drilled down on me. The book focuses on the political and religious divide in the US primarily, and his Moral Foundation Theory shines some light on the issue: In the case of conservatives vs liberals, their moral matrices are vastly different and that's a recipe for disagreement.
In Moral Foundation Theory [1], Haidt and a group of social psychologists seek to understand the variability of morality across cultures. Despite this variability, they find there are similarities and recurrent themes. They think there at least are six foundations: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/cheating, 3) Loyalty/betraying, 4) Authority/subversion, 5) Sanctity/degradation, and 6) Liberty/oppression.
According to Haidt, liberals (aka leftists, Haidt uses "libertarians" for "classical liberals") respond extremely to the harm/care and liberty/opression foundations, however conservatives do not respond to these foundations as well. In fact, conservatives respond to all the foundations by the same degree while liberals respond to only two foundations. Both liberals and conservatives respond to liberty/oppression but they approach it differently.
I'm pretty moderate (in the sense of having a weird basket of views, some quite "left", some rather "right"). I would vote for a center-right party, if we had one.
I can somewhat see where the moral intuitions of both sides of the standard political divide arise from, but it's also pretty clear to me that the American political right is now marked by an almost pathological lack of empathy and compassion, as well as a blatant hatred for truth, fact, intellect, and basic good character. Morally, it's become totally inconsistent with the traditional values I believe in. While liberals definitely over-index on empathy and compassion, it's pretty clear they are more balanced overall. And at the very least, I find them incorrect in a more mundane and acceptable way. They haven't succumbed to evil.
In the latter case, loyalty, authority and sanctity become important factors for a community, which gathers around preserving and promoting this essential message, while, if you believe in the former, these very "virtues of aggregation" may become a threat of twisting and perverting the very truths that lie in all of us (as we may have seen it exploited in fascism). Even more so, as ethics arise from synthetic judgements a priori, proper thinking and the legitimacy of propositions become important in itself. While, if truth and morality are external, someone who is in the wrong is just someone not yet touched by truth, here, wrongness becomes a state of both intellectual and moral corruption that endangers the very principles of society.
This is a great point, and Haidt does acknowledge these "virtues of aggregation" can be and have been hijacked. Case in point, facism which labels as "hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights." It's undeniable that dictators, cult leaders, etc. have exploited what he terms the "hive switch" but is that reason enough to completely do away with it, especially given its innateness as a groupish especies and its main function as a social adhesive?
(The current discussion about woke and anti-woke is really pretty much the same it had been in 1100 AD. It's just that we seem to have forgotten the virtues and necessity of what may be called "Abaelard's great appeasement".)